Session House Annual Report 2018: Ryohei Kondo

Ryohei Kondo’s “KONDO Theater with Commentary”
What I Tried to Do…

In 2018, as one way of removing the barriers between us and the audience, I tried commenting on each work on the spot.

 

And because I asked people from fields that do not normally comment directly on dance to be the commentators, I felt that many perspectives different from ours emerged.
Given the nature of contemporary dance, encouraging newcomers to come probably requires a certain strategy and a broad outlook. Thanks to its distinctive space and the performances it has actively presented day after day, I think Session House is well established as “a place for showing work.”
I think that those of us dancing as performers also create a good relationship with the audience sitting there, even if they feel crowded into the seats. Even so, I still feel that there are many aspects that operate only within a small community.

 

Each individual effort brings everyone’s full strength to bear, is interesting, and holds promise. But how to extend it, or how it might spread, is undoubtedly a challenge for contemporary dance that goes beyond Dance Bridge. A little about the content of the works. Sometimes we present the unclear tool called contemporary dance with dancing itself at the center. Sometimes we present it as an abstract story, sometimes by tracing personal events. In a good sense, there are many different ways of showing it; in a bad sense, I sometimes become uneasy about whether it is truly necessary or truly what we want to show.

 

One reason I tried commenting on each work this time was that I wondered whether, in order to face a work properly together with the audience, we need patient work resembling that of a “work counselor,” for each piece or in the process of creating it.

 

Ryohei Kondo

 

Excerpt from Session House Annual Report 2018
Photographs from the performances on October 5 and 6, 2018
Dance Bridge International 2018, from Tokyo
Ryohei Kondo’s “KONDO Theater with Commentary”
Top photograph: Ryohei Kondo’s solo “close to you”
Bottom photograph: Ryohei Kondo talking with guest Kenichi Otake (大竹健一), a trainer